Brad Pitt for Mayor of New Orleans

Sonya Chung
is author of the novels Long for This World (Scribner 2010) and The Loved Ones (Relegation Books 2016), which was a selection for Kirkus Best Fiction 2016, Indie Next List, Library Journal Best Indie Fiction, TNB Book Club, Buzzfeed Books Recommends, and Writer's Bone Best 30 Books 2016. She is founding editor of Bloom and teaches fiction writing at Skidmore College. Learn more about Sonya here.

“[I]t’s important that people begin to understand that whiteness is not inevitable, and that white dominance is not inevitable.” Claudia Rankine talks to The Guardian about her plans for the Racial Imaginary Institute, a think-tank-cum-gallery that she's founding with all that MacArthur Genius cash. See also: why Americans love poetry, but not poetry books.

Blackout, the recent memoir by Sarah Hepola, chronicles the author’s long struggle with reckless drinking. The title references the total loss of memory she experienced after some of her worst benders. At The Morning News, Rosecrans Baldwintalks with Hepola about her book, amnesia and the nature of memory.

Though Franzen would surely argue (in great excess of 140 characters) to the contrary, the excellent introductory essay from the latest issue of N+1 laudsTwitter for "the very last thing to have been expected from the internet: a renovation of the epigram or aphorism, a revaluation of the literary virtues of terseness and impersonality."

Over at Full Stop, Scott Cheshire mulls the concept of Armageddon, or, as he calls it, “The Other American Dream.” Meanwhile, a French photography team is traveling the world to take pictures of cities “without signs of life.” Perhaps the fascination isn’t so American after all.